Blogtoberfest 20

Here's the little koala from Phillip Island again.  Show off!!

Blogtoberfest 19

http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/p/90840/

Blogtoberfest 18 1/2

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Join the Universal Craft Directory

Go on, just do it!

Blogtoberfest 18

In the little Victorian town of Dunolly lies one of those great local museums that is crammed full of odds and ends of stuff that make you stop and read all sorts of things and, occasionally, think 'my mother-in-law has only just got of one of those'.  It is one of the gold mining towns of Victorian history, once thriving and now dusty and reliant on tourism.

As part of the 'Golden Triangle' of the area, it attracted many prospectors from all over the world, including some of my husband's ancestors.  On the whole they quickly gave up on prospecting, which was dirty and back-breaking and rarely successful (though the Welcome Stranger, the largest gold nugget ever found in the world, comes from there - there is a model of it in the museum), and went in for things like commerce.  Prospectors need food and drink and ... soap.  This soap label comes from what was once a thriving soap factory run by my husband's ancestors.  The slogan was 'Butterfly Soap, Flutter by dirt'.  This beautifully preserved label can also be seen in the Dunolly museum.

Blogtoberfest 17

We saw this on the notice board of the local Catholic primary school a few years ago and thought it was very funny.  We hope he has his uniform all organised and his books covered!

Blogtoberfest 16

And now for something completely different.  This little cutie lives at the Koala Sanctuary on Phillip Island and we saw her in January.  She was VERY curious and calm, and I didn't use a zoom on the camera - she really was this close to me.  In fact she was a thorough poser1  Probably has her own agent by now :)

Blogtoberfest 15

I might as well remind people of the giveaway this month.  Here is what I wrote a week ago:

Now for the giveaway details. Every comment received this month will go into a special magic giveaway hat (well, the name of the commenter will!) and after the end of Blogtober I will get a completely disintered bystander (ie. my husband) to pull a name out of the sorting hat. Each time you comment your name will go in.


The giveaway is a Mazey Pretty Things fabric brooch - see my sidebars for my Made It and Etsy shops to give you an idea of what they are like. I will post to anywhere in the world with great delight.


Look forward to hearing from you!

Surprisingly no-one has noticed the typo, or at least been too polite to point it out.  My husband would like the world to know that he is completely disinterested (i.e. unbiased), not disintered.  He is NOT a zombie and I do NOT dig him up from the garden to draw blog giveaway winners!

Blogtoberfest 14

This was a group exercise we did at college in third year called I Can See Through You.  We all had to produce something simple using sheer fabrics - an applique or something - and then we all collaborated with [inning them on to a very compliant dress model.  It was good fun.  I think the pink bit at the top was my piece but I can't really remember after all this time, though I am pretty sure I did something pink.  It took about an hour to pin everything onto the model in a pleasing way.  There was never any intention of sewing it together or doing anything permanent but it was a fun exercise in collaboration and doing something a bit different.

Blogtoberfest 13

This is a piece I did in the second year of my Diploma when we studied 3D objects.  We had to end up with a container.  I can't remember if it had to have something in it or not, but mine did.  I chose to do a reliquary because they have always fascinated me and I love the application of textile arts to religious symbolism. 

After a bit of researching I quickly came up with the idea of Santiago de Compostela and the pilgramages undertaken to the Cathedral there, known in English as the Way of St James.  I had lots of fun playing with various surface and design finishes until I came up with the one I finally chose, which was fine white silk randomly splashed with silk paint in warm colours of red, pink, yellow and orange.  It was lined with red silky stuff.  I also embroidered it in random patches of running stitch using similar colours, but not on painted patches of the same colour.  I became very fond of that technique of patches of running stitch and it became one of the main embellishments I use in my Mazey Patchwork.  Gold paint and gold thread was also used, because I wanted an opulent feel in keeping with the idea of a medieival reliquary.

I had intended using stiffish interfacing in it but my teacher at the time got all huffy about using a synthetic interfacing and told me to use calico.  I did trial calico and it seemed to work but I regret not using the original idea as it never did stand as stiff and straight as I wanted.  She and I were a bit mixture, big personality clash and completely different interests and values.  She taught me for two subjects that year and told me that she was only passing me in one of them (not the one we did this project in, she couldn't very well fail me in that because my final project was as good as anyone else's!) because she didn't want to do the paperwork involved in failing me.  Miserable woman.  She didn't work there again after that year.

A reliquary obviously has to hold a relic.  I used gold Delicas to bead a tiny vial using peyote stitch, including a tiny beaded lid which was attached by a couple of beads and fastened with a beaded loop, and it contained the arm of Saint ... I can't actually remember the name I made up but I created a wholly fictional saint, with a back story and everything!  The arm came from a nasty little plastic doll from the $2 shop that I hacked off and stained with paint the colour of dried blood.  I think I may have included a hand as well.

The 'lid' comes from the tops of the panels, six I think there were, triangular in shape, with threads tieing them together and a shell shaped gold button to hold it altogether (the shell being the symbol of St James of Compostela).

I chose this particular picture for this post because I like to think of it as a rather arty-farty photo, but I do have more process-oriented photos that I can post if anyone is interested in the more practical side of it.  It was a fun thing to make and I am still proud of it!

Blogtoberfest 12

The last pear, I promise!

This involved experimentation, and was fun.  It was the first time I had ever used Tyvek, or painted Wonder-Under or whatever you want to call that applique stuff you iron onto one surface and then use it to adhere to another.  (The iron and the ironing board, frequently!)  The Tyvek is painted then ironed and cut into a pear shape and sewn down to the background, which is half painted Wonder Under and half painted calico (well, the whole thing is calico, but some of it has the other stuff on top of it, if you get what I mean!).  Then the bottom bit has machine stitching on it to simulate the look of a striped table cloth.

Blogtoberfest 11

Um, it's a pear.  Again.

A rather bad example of attempting to create modern blackwork in a hurry when you haven't done blackwork for 30 years.  Green embroidery thread on even-count linen.  My least favorite pear.  But I love blackwork and really want to have a go at designing some PROPERLY at some stage.

Blogtoberfest 10

Another pear.  This one is made from air-drying clay (which stinks, btw), deliberately left roughly moulded with finger prints in it.  Then painted and rubbed with a wad of kitchen towel and left to dry again, and then some gold paint rubbed lightly on bits of it.  Then stuck down lightly to a piece of patchwork fabric and peyote stitched around with seed beads to form a huge bezel, if you think of the pear as a large cabachon.  Then shadow stitched with black embroidery thread (perl or stranded, I can't remember).  I also can't remember if I used felt or thin cotton wadding for the wadding.

Blogtoberfest 9

When I was studying for my Diploma of Studio Stitch (Textiles) - textile art - we had a fantastic  teacher who was obsesssed with pears.  They are rather attractive, I suppose!  One assignment we were given was to choose from a small list of things (I forget the rest, but pears was definitely one of them!) and do three small items, each one using a different technique.  I started this as one of them but realised that it was so time-consuming that it was better to use it for my end-of-semester piece, a folder cover, and did three other pears instead.  (They will be appearing during Blogtoberfest!)

This was probably only my second major piece of bead embroidery and I am very pleased with it.  It mostly uses czech seed beads with some other beads from my stash, and some small buttons, sewn straight onto cream felt.  I still feel rather proud of this piece!

Blogtoberfest 8

Now for the giveaway details.  Every comment received this month will go into a special magic giveaway hat (well, the name of the commenter will!) and after the end of Blogtober I will get a completely disintered bystander (ie. my husband) to pull a name out of the sorting hat.  Each time you comment your name will go in.

The giveaway is a Mazey Pretty Things fabric brooch - see my sidebars for my Made It and Etsy shops to give you an idea of what they are like.  I will post to anywhere in the world with great delight.

Look forward to hearing from you!

Blogtoberfest 7

This leaf is also knitted with my handspun, but dyed with Landscape dyes.  Again it is yarn I made a long time ago, and the leaf was knitted quite a while ago, but the whole thing only went together very recently.

Blogtoberfest 6

The last of this run of hats.  I got really sick of knitting them after five1  But I am happy with the way they knitted up.  This leaf is knitted from handspun dyed with Landscape dyes.  I had a little collection of leaves that were variously used up in a whole host of things and these hats finished off the last of them.  As leaves are so useful for adding to all sorts of things I think I will have to knit some more now and get a new collection going!

Blogtoberfest 5

This leaf was knitted from gorgeous variegated yarn bought in Bairnsdale at the Jolly Jumbuck, a place which sells lots of sheepy products.  They used to have an amazing selection of yarn dyed for them by Marta of Marta's Yarns, who sadly died a few years ago (no pun intended); now their yarns tend to be different though still qutie nice.  I bought this, and a lovely green one, in the great days of yore.

Blogtoberfest 4

LUMPS

for my friend Karen at http://karenruane.blogspot.com/ who does the most amazing embroidery and who you must all check out.  (Please).

Blogtoberfest 3

This yarn is too pastelly for me but would look great on someone else.  The leaf is another handspun, ecodyed one, needlefelted onto polar fleece, with a few wisps of Angelina fibre needlefelted on top to give it an unexpected sparkle.

That was the one and only time I ever did any 'ecodying', which is such a buzzword now.  I must try it again some time!

Blogtoberfest 2

I've mentioned doing hats.  This is the first of the finished ones.  The embellished leaf is from various playings around in the past, while the hat is new.  The leaf was knitted from wool I spun and dyed with eucalyptus leaves a long time ago, needlefelted onto polar fleece and with some coloured flecks needlefelted on top of it.

Blogtoberfest!!

Whoops, I seem to have signed up for something which wants me to post EVERY DAY FOR A MONTH.  There might be a lot of single photos this month with few words!

For more on Blogtoberfest see the linkity thing on the sidebar.  It is dead cute but most definitely not designed by me, that's way beyond my techy skills!!!

I'm even doing my first ever giveaway.  (well, let's face it, I can't seem to sell them, so I would rather they went to a good home anyway!)

there will be details soon.  It will involve a fabric brooch from MazeyPrettyThings (see sidebars for Made It shop and Etsy shop to give you an idea of what I mean.

See you tomorrow!

It's a Nice Day for a White Wedding

On Sunday we went up to Bendigo to see the Wedding Dress exhibitions (one from the V&A, one Australian one).  It was fantabulous, but I can't show you any pictures.  Suffice it to say that it was full of frills and furbelows and white and cream and sparkly bits!  (And for anyone wondering, a furbelow is a ruffle !)  Even with corsets I wondered at how tiny many of the waists were.  And the shoes!  Women had very small feet in the past apparently, both in length and width.  But I suppose most people were, generally, smaller in the past than they are now.

I can show you gratuitous pictures of Bendigo as I continued to experiment with my new camera.  (Which is a Lumix of some point and shoot variety, for those interested in the details - anything else would be too technical for me!)

The Bendigo Rotary Club Gardens were full of spring blooms in the spring sunshine:

And the - maybe the Town Hall?  Or some other grand Victorian gold era building - was adorned with dragons and lions very handsomely.

That may have been the same building that housed the tourist information office and a little exhibition space where I enjoyed 'Raw ‘n’ Funky, Fine Art Fashions in Felt' and this charming tiled motif on the doorstep.

It was a nice day to top off a week off work.  A sort of relaxing week in which I finished hats (coming soon to a blog near you!), set up an Etsy shop (see side bar of a blog VERY NEAR YOU RIGHT NOW), watched several episodes of Quincy ME, and carted my children around to medical appointments.  Including Wombat, in an ambulance, to a casualty department.  He came off his bike rather hard.  In the end he was better off than the bike, which is having surgery at the moment, while he escaped with (nasty) scrapes and bruises.  Fortunately we have always insisted on them wearing helmets and I am very grateful that the depressed fracture in the helmet was not magnified into his skull.

My Creative Space

I am trying to turn my 'Mazey Patchwork' into my signature style, and this week has been about working on this piece and taking close ups of it.  Basically it is a stitched form of complex cloth, which once it comes off the machine is cut up into random shapes and then further embellished with hand stitching, beads, buttons, etc, lined with satin or something similar and turned into brooches and other fabric jewellery forms.

Enjoy!  And enjoy other creative spaces here!

Stacks

A project of Stacks!  This is piles of Books to be Read.  There are other Books to be Read but they are scattered around the house.  I read A LOT.

Paper Stacks

“...Wednesday September 21st, The Altered Page will host Paper Stacks, an online collaboration. Please leave a comment on this post if you would like to participate. All you need to do is post an image on 9/21 on your own blog of your stacks – be they papers, books, journals, or anything else of your liking. On the 21st I will post a list of all participating artists on my blog so that you can be sure to find all the links to the stacks. Feel free to let your own readers know about this project by spotlighting it on a post on or prior to reveal day. Please (and this is important) email me with a link when your post goes up so I know to add you to the posted list on my blog.

This is one time when the higher your stacks of stuff, the better. “
Here is the link .

Playing With the New Camera - my spring garden